Oh, Prato

What a week it has been! I choose not to bore you with the details of my craptastic week and instead want to disclose a secret about a little town called Prato. Ready? It is awesome! Shhhh...


Visualizzazione ingrandita della mappa


Prato is town of about 200,000 and located only 20 minutes from Florence on the train. It is also the home of my friends Ilyssa and Mirko. It isn't much talked about and in fact I had not heard of it until Ilyssa told me in November that she was moving there. It is, if you remember, the place I went for the blind dinner with Ilyssa and Mirko in October. While I did not see much of it that night (pause for joke), I did get a drive-by tour of the main piazzas and city center and was impressed with what I saw.

I was not to return to Prato until this week. My friends invited me to come spend the afternoon on Wednesday. We took a walk in a gorgeous park at the foot of the hills before heading home for a delicious meal thanks to Chef Ilyssa. It was so wonderful to be in a home with good friends just having a great time. You see I don't have a car, or a scooter, or even a bike for that matter right now. I can't go for a drive when I need air. I can't run to Sonic for a limeade when I need a pick-me-up, or spend hours walking through Target for retail therapy. My friends gave me a big boost - they were the perfect cherry limeade to my down-in-the-dumps attitude.


Okay, so while Ilyssa and Mirko are undoubtedly the number one reason why I enjoy Prato, I would like to share with you some other reasons it is a cool little place. Saturday morning, after talking a long run around the city, Ilyssa called to say ciao and I decided it was the perfect opportunity to invite myself to Prato for the day. Yes please! After about an hour I found myself with Ilyssa and Mirko's friend Pablo at Mirko's soccer game at the foot of the snow-capped Prato hills. It was a beautiful little setting just 15 minutes or so from the heart of Prato. The final score was 1-1, but Mirko's team won in my mind because their warm-up routine had far superior choreography. After the game we drove through the hills and to the tiny little hilltop town of Migliana with a famous little shop called Antico Forno Santi, that made wonderful scacciata (I can't believe I spelled that right on my first try!) and incredibly delicious biscotti. We wound back down to the city passing through olive tree groves and villas on a street with the craziest hair-pin turns ever.


Then, my life as I know it changed completely. That evening the four of us watched the Sixth Sense in Italian on their couch before heading to dinner. When I pictured where we were going for dinner, rightfully so, I pictured a small, intimate restaurant with candle-lit tables. (I realize how bad that sounds.) Boy was I wrong. After a short drive down a four-lane...road (not cobblestones and not a highway - a regular road!) I begin to see bright lights in the distance. As we get closer I can read "Multiplex" lit up in huge lights on the size of a gigantic building. Is that a movie theater? Then I see a giant structure across the parking lot from it. A giant grocery store? An H&M? A GIANT SHOE STORE? SPORTING GOODS?! WHAT!? It is a suburbian mall in Italy! When we turned right to go into the parking lot I thought I might go into cardiac arrest.

Omnia Center, Prato

It felt like home. As much as I absolutely love living in the heart of the birthplace of the Renaissance and eating over the open flames of candle light, a girl needs a mall every once in a while. We explored the enormous sporting goods store in all its fluorescent light glory and I never wanted to leave. We went drove to the other side of the parking lot (haha!!!) to a separate structure with a giant gym, restaurants, a bowling alley, arcade and underground parking lot. I'm so sold. We ate good pizza at a large, open restaurant that could have been in Scottsdale, Arizona for all I knew. Beside it was another super-large theme restaurant called the Old Wild West. They had burgers, steaks, ribs, big salads. I have died and gone to cowgirl heaven. The Omnia Center is not the only mall of this kind in Prato, Tuscany or even Florence. Nor is it the largest by any means. But I have not seen any others before yesterday. And to get to enjoy it with friends in a car, instead of by myself on a bus was way fun and extremely therapeutic.

Again, Prato was amazing because I was with great friends simply having a wonderful Saturday. It would not have been the same experience without them. But let's give Prato its due here. It has a very charming and lively historic city center fully of bustling piazzas, beautiful churches, great restaurants and bars featuring live music and good times. Additionally, it has a Leawood, Kansas. No really, sits 20 minutes northwest of Florence in the middle of stunning hills with a beautiful river running alongside Via Galileo Galilei. Its suburbs are equally as charming and the new malls and entertainment centers are a great response to the need of bored Italian teenagers.


And while I don't want to spend my life in Italy at the Omnia Center funplex of Prato, it is nice to see a bit of the familiar every once in a while. Being there with friends really flipped my week around. It ended a bad one and started a new one on a very good note. I spent the train ride home pondering how I can get myself a scooter so I can drive to Prato and play with Ilyssa on a regular basis. In the meantime I'll stick to the train.